The Eagleman Stag: 2013 SOTW Best Short Animation Award

“The larger our past gets, the smaller our present feels.”

The Eagleman Stag is an award-winning, stunning monochrome stop-motion animated short film by Michael Please, which was awarded Best Short Animation at the 2011 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA). The film has received universal acclaim playing at high-profile film festivals including Sundance and SXSW, winning awards at Annecy and Clermont-Ferrand, in addition to BAFTA. The film was named one of 10 finalists competing for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. The Eagleman Stag has just been honored as winner of the 2013 SOTW Best Short Animation Award.

Told in a distinctive, contemporary film-noir style, The Eagleman Stag is a story of life and fear, a darkly comic take on one man’s obsession with the quickening perception of time that faces all of us as we age, and his attempts to counter this effect. As Peter Eagleman nears the end of his days, his obsessive attempts to define the world, and his haunting perception of time within it, leads to progressively extreme measures to control and counter time’s increasing pace.

The Eagleman Stag: A Breathlessly Dark Story of Life and Fear

“The larger our past gets, the smaller our present feels.”

The Eagleman Stag is an award-winning, stunning monochrome stop-motion animated short film by Michael Please, which was awarded Best Short Animation at the 2011 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA). The film has received universal acclaim playing at high-profile film festivals including Sundance and SXSW, winning awards at Annecy and Clermont-Ferrand, in addition to BAFTA. The film has just been announced as one of 10 finalists competing for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Told in a distinctive, contemporary film-noir style, The Eagleman Stag is a story of life and fear, a darkly comic take on one man’s obsession with the quickening perception of time that faces all of us as we age, and his attempts to counter this effect. As Peter Eagleman nears the end of his days, his obsessive attempts to define the world, and his haunting perception of time within it, leads to progressively extreme measures to control and counter time’s increasing pace.

Loom: A Visual Metaphor for Nature’s Cruel Cycle of Life and Death

Loom is a brilliant, award-winning five-minute CGI short film, made by students at the German design and storytelling collective Polynoid. Blending a variety of aesthetic and cultural influences, Polynoid’s multifaceted creative vision is nourished by interests in graffiti, nature, graphic novels, science and philosophy. With a rich observational eye for detail, Polynoid has established a strong visual language all of its own. Polynoid’s narrative technique combines new forms of storytelling with a shared interest in progressive sound design to create a minimalist, photo-real and abstract sensory experience.

Loom won The Best In Show at Siggraph, 2010, and just recently won the Best Animated Movie Award at Sehsüchte 2011 in Potsdam, Germany. Loom explores natural causal cycles through the visual metaphor of a moth caught in a spider’s web. The story of the moth’s drowning reveals a larger range of thematic concerns about life and death from a tale told on a micro scale. The full-version of the film is presented below:

In A Flash: All Your Life Appears Before Your Eyes

In A Flash is a 15-second short film by Stephen Fitzgerald, created for the Motion Design tournament of the Cut & Paste Global Championships in New York. The theme for the competition was “Dear Life, Thanks For Everything, Sincerely Me.” Fitzgerald took the theme and imagined it as that defining moment people talk about when their life flashes before their eyes.

We Have Decided Not to Die: Spiritual Rituals of Reversible Destiny

We Have Decided Not to Die is an award-winning, very unusual and deeply intriguing eight-minute short film by the Australian filmmaker Daniel Askill. A Triptych. Three Rituals. Three Figures. Three modern-day journeys of transcendence. From the post-modern quirk school of filmmaking, this piece transforms the power of ritual actions into an emotional allegory that creates a world beyond evolution, creationism and intelligent design. From a mental state where logic drops away, the film embarks upon a visually lyrical odyssey along a poetically surreal road to reversible destiny, where death is no longer inevitable.

OneDreamRush/China: A Ridiculously Obscure, Intoxicating Dream of Life

OneDreamRush: China is a 42-second short film directed by Maxim Zhestkov and Matt Pyke at Universal Everything. The film is one of the 2009 Beijing Independent Film Festival’s 42 short films, each one being only 42-seconds long and based on the common question, “How do we dream?” OneDreamRush: China is a ridiculously obscure and confusing little film, but at the same time it’s intoxicating in a mesmerizing sense. The film is truly intriguing, taking an average thought or feeling that seems so ordinary to each and every one of us and then soaring out to other dimensions, into the realm of the extraordinary. In the directors’ sense of creativity, they twist, tweak and turn an ordinary, average, everyday emotion (or dream) in totally unanticipated ways. By the time this 42-second short film reaches its unforeseen finale, they’ve managed to turn the obscurely mundane into a larger than life feeling within each of us.

OneDreamRush/China: A Ridiculously Obscure, Intoxicating Dream of Life

An Imaginary Life: Where Do Dead Imaginary Friends Go?

My Imaginary Friends

I usually very frequently post articles about Barack Obama. In fact, my articles here about him go way back to when he first published The Audacity of Hope. I ran across Barack when he was doing a book signing at one of our neighborhood bookstores, 59th Street Books in Hyde Park. Immediately afterwards, I went home and began writing my first and second articles about Obama. One of my last articles about him was posted here upon the emotionally stunning occasion of Obama’s election to be President of the United States. Subsequently, almost all of the media attention has been focused on the quotidian details of speculations about who Obama might select for senior staff positions in his administrations, and about how and how well various potential candidates might perform. And media pundits’ quarrelsome bickering about all of that. I have decided to refrain from joining in on the daily dramas of the media “guessing games.” For now, Barack is gone; he’s been very busy in a bunch of secret meetings, hidden away behind closed doors. And for the time being, that leaves me feeling a bit sad, like my imaginary friend has faded away.

So then I began to think more about imaginary friends. It’s hard for me to remember having any imaginary friends. Never did. Ever. That I can remember, anyway. Well, now that I’ve thought about it some, I did meet up with some imaginary friends when I was a youngster. I liked them a lot, too. I met them through books. You see, nobody taught me how to read, but I was already reading books when I was just five-years old. Robinson Caruso was my first imaginary friend, though he was always a bit fuzzy and cluttered up by all the pictures of the flora and fauna on that lush tropical island, as well as by the various colorful characters he encountered. Anyway, I didn’t stick with any one imaginary companion very long, over the years running through uncountable adventures of the the Bobbsey Twins (mostly Bert), Dorothy from Oz (but mostly The Tin Man and The Scarecrow), Black Beauty, The Lone Ranger, Rocketman and Lassie. Oh, I certainly can’t forget this one, and I had a dog that was really my bestest-ever-ever imaginary friend. I rescued him from a situation of terrible physical and emotional abuse, and we immediately became inseparable. But then he died (actually, got run over). All of them ended up just fading away from me. But part of me still wonders: where did all of my dead imaginary friends actually go?

About Imaginary Friends

For much of the first-half of the 20th century, experts about children either relegated or attributed imaginary friends to an immature stage of “magical thinking” that children needed to outgrow, or else the very notion of the existence of imaginary friends was just plain darkly dismissed.

But nowadays, an almost exactly opposite perspective prevails about imaginary friends. Studies in the area of child development have found that far from being done with imaginary companions at the age of four, older children (as well as some teenagers) report having imaginary companions. Research now suggests that imaginary friends can provide emotional stability, feelings of competence and a sense of enhanced social perception. Once again, “wholesome fantasy” is alive and well!

But what happens to one’s imaginary friends when childhood imaginary companions fade away, are rejected or dismissed when real-world opportunities for social interaction become more available and appealing to the child? Where do the poor little imaginary friends go when they die? Are they really gone or dead, or are they still sadly hanging around down here, watching as the real world goes around and passes them by? The following animated short film addresses that very question. At first, the film seems to be a light-hearted and humorous one, but the issues with which it deals are universally serious topics, matters of rejection, life and death.